It is Children’s Day tomorrow, and I remember it with the fondness one reserves for the simplest, happiest corners of childhood. Back in school, it was the one day when the classrooms would empty out, the blackboards would rest, and we’d tumble into the yellow school buses, bursting with laughter and excitement. The buses would set off towards a national park or one of Delhi’s many historic monuments ringed with gardens — Jantar Mantar, Humayun’s Tomb, Lodhi Gardens or Nehru Park — places that felt magically ours for the day.
We’d run wild beneath bougainvillaea-laced trees, chasing one another across sunlit lawns, our winter uniforms slightly too crisp and our hands always a little cold. There was a familiar rhythm to it all — the chatter of friends, the sound of birds breaking through the distant hum of traffic, the teachers smiling indulgently as they too let their guard down.
Lunch would be the same every year: aloo-puri packed lovingly from home and a tetra pack of mango Frooti, its sweetness sticky on the fingers and forever tied to the memory of childhood’s uncomplicated joy. The air would fill with the comforting scent of ghee and pickle — sharp, tangy, familiar — as children opened their tiffins one after another, each revealing a small treasure trove from home. Someone’s mother would have packed paneer parathas, still warm and soft at the centre; another’s box held samosas wrapped in paper gone translucent with oil. There was laughter over shared homemade noodles, whose Frooti stayed cold the longest, whose mother made the best halwa.
Those days felt infinite. The air carried a gentle chill, and the city’s gardens would come alive with the laughter of hundreds of children. We would spread out on picnic mats, share our food, trade stickers or stories, and for a few precious hours, the world belonged only to us. Even the crumbs left behind glistened in the sun — proof of a day well spent, of joy that came easy. But I wonder — is it still the same now?
When I asked a few schoolchildren about their plans for Children’s Day this year, their answers were tinged with a quiet disappointment. Most parents, they said, are reluctant to send their children out for picnics because of Delhi’s toxic air, which leaves more little ones coughing than playing. “We’ll probably sit in the classroom and watch a film or a documentary with friends,” said eight-year-old Katya Bera from Noida.
“My parents are not comfortable sending me to school picnics, and I’m also not very interested as so many of my friends are ill and won’t be coming,” shared thirteen-year-old Aalia Rathore from Delhi.
It is heartbreaking to think that the joy once found in open skies and sprawling gardens is now stifled by a haze so heavy that it dims even the laughter of childhood. What was once a day of freedom and play has turned into a quieter celebration within closed walls — a reminder of all that has changed in the air we breathe and the childhoods we create.
But who is to be blamed? The mud-slinging has already begun, and as the reports tell us, the air we breathe today is a shade worse than last year’s. Can you even imagine someone in the higher ranks saying something so casually, as if our children’s lungs were mere statistics on a page?
We are raising a generation cocooned inside their homes, surrounded by humming air purifiers, their windows sealed against the very world they should be running through. These are children who know the scent of sanitised air better than the smell of wet earth after rain. They grow up tracing the outlines of trees through glass panes, learning early to live in caution instead of curiosity. Their picnics are replaced by lunch breaks under fluorescent light — sandwiches in cling film instead of aloo-puri, juice boxes instead of the syrupy sweetness of Frooti under the sun. Even the air feels flavourless, filtered, stripped of the spice of life itself.
We are stealing from them the simple, boundless pleasures that once defined childhood — the freedom to run across a field without coughing, to chase a ball till the sun dipped low, to come home flushed and breathless, not gasping for air. The very spaces that once echoed with laughter now lie muted under a heavy, invisible veil of smog.
And when these children, wiser and braver than we ever were, step out to demand their most basic right — the right to breathe — we find it easier to quieten them than to listen. We close the doors, pull the curtains, and tell them to stay safe inside, as though safety could ever replace freedom.
What are we truly leaving behind for them? A city that once bloomed with colour and chatter now coughs under its own weight. The skies that were once painted blue are now a dull, unending grey. And the children, who should have been our brightest hope, are learning too soon what it means to live with limits — limits we created for them.
The same city that once smelled of guavas and roasted peanuts in winter now reeks of exhaust and despair. The sweetness of childhood memories — of Frooti, of puri-aloo, noodles and halwa — lingers only in our minds. What will their memories taste like? Filtered air and sealed rooms?Childhood, once a picnic of flavours, has turned into something bland, something we forgot to season with care.